Located on a 155 hectare site, HafenCity is one of the most prominent city centre development projects in Europe and will increase the size of Hamburg’s city centre by 40%. Situated directly between the historic Speicherstadt warehouse district and the River Elbe, there will be a new city with a cosmopolitan mix of apartments, service businesses, culture, leisure, tourism, and retail. The whole development is managed by HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Development of the entire area will continue until 2020–25.

The most important aim of HafenCity Hamburg is to pursue a strategy of creating urbanity. Urbanity is itself a very unclear notion—it is an unclear aim—but due to the fact that it is such a diffusive political statement, it helps also to integrate quite a number of different perspectives. It helps to integrate political long-term perspectives, it helps to integrate a planning perspective, and it is the starting point for a transformation strategy for space. Therefore it helps very much to take urbanity as a major starting point for our activities and as our major aim. I would say that if Hafen- City is a successful project, at the end of the day it will be judged by the degree of liveliness, of being a meeting point for different people, not only residents but also workers, visitors, people from Hamburg and the outside. And that they find it interesting to be there and that people get the impression that something happens that they didn’t expect—that it has some degree of being a surprising place, not only a commercial space in certain technical or physical features, but at the end of the day that it also has the features of being open, maybe a little bit contradictory to people’s expectations, and that it serves as a starting point for thinking about what our cities should be like and what we want them to be like.

I’m not really familiar with the planning situation in Reykjavík, but what is clear to me is that Reykjavík did not have a coherent strategy for developing a cohesive picture of the city. There was no common aesthetic value and no, as I see it, cohesive picture of what the city should be like in aesthetic terms which would be specific to Reykjavík for visitors and people living here. Today that seems to be a major problem because of the speed of the development and money pouring into the economy. The character or the identity of the city—at the end of the day; I’m not talking about city branding—is not further developed but is becoming more diffused, more heterogeneous, more unclear. It is necessary that cities be heterogeneous in order to serve different perspectives and people’s different aspirations, but they have to a certain degree, also, to provide an incentive for a common perspective on the lifesphere in which people are living. At the present moment, as a visitor, I do not get the impression that there is a strategy for creating a more cohesive picture of the city. It is more heterogeneous than it should be.

It is important that the political representatives of a city, through interchange with the people of the city, form a basic idea of what there should be in the future, in fifteen or twenty years. People working in planning and also the civil groups will have to look into how they can contribute. The professionals have to develop new perspectives for devising a transformation strategy, time-wise and spatially, maybe developing new tools to come to better results. The civic realm will have to define its role and ask how they want to contribute to the process and what kind of civic engagement is necessary. Is it at the project level and left to politicians, or is it left to specific interventions in certain areas and projects? The civic intervention will probably have to be played out on completely different scales, at the macro level of the city and looking at very specific projects. That gives different levels of engagement for different types of interests in society, reflecting also the different time spans and potentials of different people relating to the environment.